Seeing David Adjmi’s ‘3C’ again on Friday evening, I was struck by two things: It really is one of the best productions of the season, as well as one of the saddest. That’s probably one of the reasons the show has gotten such a deeply divided reception from both critics and audiences: The familiar frame of “Three’s Company” is juxtaposed with utter bleakness.

Now, Adjmi explains what he had in mind writing the play (and yes, the guy talks in complete paragraphs):

“[The TV series] really represented for me what the popular culture was, and I would see myself in that mirror and see the discrepancies, feeling very confused by it. We talked about it with the cast in terms of Pop Art, Andy Warhol and the soup cans: He was not critiquing vegetable soup, there was a broader cultural matrix there. So I wanted to use this iconography as a springboard to talk about other things. I get disappointed when people look at the play as a satire of ‘Three’s Company.’ Some of the reviews stick on that one level and it’s not about that at all. For me there’s a lot of rage and anger and violence and hostility in the world of the play, and these poor souls are orbiting in it. They’re kind of suspended in this limbo because they don’t know how to match the social roles the culture demands with who they are inside. There’s such a disparity that it starts to suffocate them, and it makes them manic. There’s this manic energy inside the play, but also those awful, horrible gaps that punctuate it as they try to navigate this social world. It’s a very existential play in the end. Some people look at that conceit and go, Blech. Someone wrote that they felt it was a stunt. But for me it’s a very personal play. It’s me looking in the mirror of popular culture and going, Oh my God, how can I live inside of this? I’m juxtaposing the artifice of the sitcom tropes with this raw, personal stuff.”